I mentor a fairly large group of graduate instructors and contingent faculty (all of whom independently teach their own writing courses), and would like to share all of my assignment sequences with them from several of my current and past courses. I can't seem to figure out how to do this without either A) adding them to my Canvas courses (I don't like the idea of so many observers in my current Canvas classes), or B) exporting my classes in .imscc and emailing it to them, thereby forcing them to upload my content into one of their own Canvas courses, thereby cluttering their classes with several hundred files, the vast majority of which will be unused. They don't need to copy a single course of mine, rather have access to the materials from 4 or 5 of my courses.
So how in this situation do I share my materials in an efficient way outside of the Canvas infrastructure?
Thank you,
Henry Laufenberg PhD.
English Department
University of Washington
Hi Henry,
I have a couple of possibilities. Do you know if Commons is enabled in your instance of Canvas? If so, this is a perfect use case for it. You can push entire courses or select components such as Assignments, Pages, Modules, etc to Commons where others can then import those items into their courses. When you share things to Commons you can select to share with the world, just your school, or if you have an Admin create a group with just you and your colleagues as members you can also share just with that group of individuals.
If you have the ability to create additional courses on Canvas, how about creating one for the purpose of sharing and then copying just the content you want to share into it? Enroll your colleagues into it so that they can import content from it into their courses. When they import content they have the option of selecting what content comes over so they don't have to get everything. At my schools we have a course role created named Copier for this purpose. If I add a Copier into my course they have access to copy content out, but they can't edit anything or see any student data.
Last, I want to mention that your method of exporting the course and sending it to them is not a terrible idea. When they import the course they don't have to import it all. They can choose to just bring in what they want and be selective.
I've included below links to a few guides which might be helpful.
How do I copy content from another Canvas course using the Course Import tool?
All about Canvas Commons
How do I share a resource to Commons?
How do I import and view a Commons resource in Canvas?
How do I create and manage Groups in Commons?
I hope this helps. You might need to get a local Canvas admin to help out to create groups in Commons or create some courses for you.
Rick